Social media

The secrets of finding and sharing great content online

January 19, 2010 By Mark Tosczak 3 Comments

What are you sharing? (Image by jzlomek via stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/254271)

One of the primary activities on social media sites is content sharing. Through Facebook, Twitter and other sites, people pass around content they find interesting, entertaining and useful. Content sharing is the fuel for a lot of social media activity. A shared video or blog post can often become the basis for a conversation about that content. If one of your goals online is to build a reputation for expertise in some subject, content sharing is a great way to do that. By sharing links to content about, for example, investing, you position yourself as someone who knows a lot about that topic.

I get a lot of positive comments about the quality and quantity of content I share online. I think it’s been a major factor in the reputation I (think) I’ve built online, as well as the number of followers I have on Twitter (though I am no A-lister — yet). And I think a lot of people are a baffled by how I’m able to consistently share a steady stream of useful, interesting content. So here’s a little tutorial on my “secrets” of effective content sharing.

1. Establish a steady incoming stream of material to review for possible sharing.

Subscribe to blogs and news sites in your niche using an RSS reader such as Google Reader. If you are having trouble finding these sites, check out Alltop. Chances are, it has a pretty good list in your niche.

Subscribe to email newsletters in your niche. Many of the sites you subscribed to will also have email newsletters. Subscribe to those. You may want to use a separate email account (such as a free Yahoo or Gmail account) if you’re worried about your main email inbox being overrun. Some sites will offer more original content via email than they do via RSS.

Blatant self promotion: I offer both an RSS feed and an email subscription — over there on the right side of the page. The email subscription gets you all the blog posts as they’re published, plus additional “bonus” content — extra articles and tips, resource links, free guides and special offers.

Establish Google searches for key terms in your niche. If you have a really broad niche (such as investing or social media or exercise), you may want to keep your search terms narrow and specific, otherwise you’ll get a lot of the same links that you have coming in via the blogs and news sites. If you have a Google account (which I recommend, to access Big G’s many useful and free services), you can get these alerts via email or via RSS feed; choose whichever you find easier to manage.

2. Filter the incoming material for possible sharing.

If you follow the steps above, you will have a lot more material than you’ll actually want to share. Sharing, let’s say, 3-10 useful links a day is good. Sharing 50 will just overwhelm people. Don’t share everything you find. Instead, filter. When you filter — choosing the best content to pass along to your community — you add value.

I recommend filtering in batches, once or twice a day. I usually do this in the morning. What you want to do is pick out the best stuff to share. Here’s my quick-and-dirty two-step algorithm for filtering material quickly.

Look at the headline or summary. Does it appeal to you? Does it seem interesting, entertaining or useful? Does it seem like it would be relevant to your community? Is it new and interesting? If so, click on the link and open that up in a separate tab in your browser.
Once you’ve gotten a bunch of tabs opened up, review the material. Again, apply the criteria form Step 1. Pick the best 3-10 (depending on what you think is the ideal daily number for you and your community). Close the tabs for the links you’re NOT going to share.

3. Automate your sharing.

I automate most of my sharing. I do this because I want to reserve my limited “live” time on social media sites for responding and conversation, not pushing out links. There are lots of tools that allow you to schedule social media updates ahead of time. The one I’m now using that I like best is Hootsuite.

Hootsuite is an online app, so it’s available on any computer I have a web browser open on. There’s also an iPhone app version, though I haven’t tried it yet. In addition to scheduling, Hootsuite will also push updates to Facebook and LinkedIn, two of my other primary social media sites. And Hootsuite will integrate with Ping.fm, which in turn can push updates out to dozens of different social sites an status updates. I also like Hootsuite because it has a built-in URL shortener and has click-through tracking built in — useful for measuring how valuable people are finding your updates.

I usually space out my content sharing updates throughout the day, rather than doing a lot at one time. So, for example, I might schedule one at 9 a.m., another at 10:30 a.m., another at noon, another at 2 p.m. and a final one at 4 p.m. I think this allows me more opportunities to get in front of more people in my community, as different people are checking out social sites at different times during the day. However, if you’ve done this and have had a better experience bunching a lot of updates together, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

4. Check in during the day.

Log in to your social sites periodically during the day to respond to and participate to any conversation or reaction that might spring up around your shared content. This could be as simple as thanking people who are retweeting one of your tweets, to weighing in on a conversation that breaks out on Facebook about a link you’ve shared.

5. Measure your results.

If you’re doing this for primarily personal reasons, this may be less important to you. But if you are using this for any kind of social media marketing activity, you’ll want to measure how effective your content sharing activities are. I would like at three primary measurements here:

How many people clicked through your link to actually look at the content? As I mentioned above, one of the reasons I like Hootsuite is that it has this functionality built in. However, other URL shorteners also offer this.
How many people shared the content you’re sharing? For example, on Twitter how many people retweeted it? This is a sign that people found your content engaging enough to share with their own communities.
How much of a conversation sprung up around your content sharing? How many people responded or made a comment about it? How long did those conversations last (how many back and forths).

Those are my “secrets” to effective content sharing online. What do you think? Do you have more tips on sharing content? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Filed Under: Microblogging, Personal branding, Popular, Social media Tagged With: content sharing, Google searches, RSS feeds, scheduling tweets

Have you done a personal social media audit lately?

January 18, 2010 By Mark Tosczak 4 Comments

Have you done a social media audit of yourself lately? Maybe you should.

Do your social media profiles need to be cleaned up? (Image by lusi at stock.xchng)

By social media audit, I mean updating all those profiles you have on various social media sites. I started doing this recently, and was surprised to find how much information I had let become out of date — my job title, what town I lived in, etc. In addition to profiles on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Plaxo, don’t forget your own bio on your blog, if you have one.

Here are five things to do during a social media audit:

1. Update all of your profile information. Have you moved, been promoted, changed employers or had any other changes since you last created that profile? Is there any information that’s out of date that should be deleted? In addition to the usual social networking sites (such as LinkedIn and Twitter), don’t forget to update your online profile in other groups you belong to — professional organizations, alumni associations, etc.

2. Update your profile picture, if you want. You may want to use different pictures on different sites, to highlight different aspects of your personality. Or you may want to use the same picture across all sites for personal branding consistency. It’s up to you, but ask yourself if you need to add or update pictures to any of your social media profiles.

Tip: Keep a profile picture or two in Flickr. That way you have it available to add to any social media profile no matter what computer you are working on (home, work, school or whatever).

3. Get active on sites that you’ve ignored for a while. I’m not suggesting you should be really active on every social media site — there are too many for that. However, if you’ve been neglecting your LinkedIn activity and that’s a part of your plan for personal branding via social media, it’s worth spending some time there. (And making a plan for being there more consistently.)

4. Record all those passwords somewhere. If you’re like me, you have profiles and passwords to lots of different sites. I have a couple of tricks for remembering them all, but too often I have to rely on the “forgot your password” link. Start recording these somewhere (safe). I’m using index cards that are filed alphabetically in a little box I keep on my desk at home. If you’re paranoid about security, you can lock this in a safe. There are many software solutions available for this (Clipperz is very secure, but if you forget your password to the site, you’re screwed).

5. Bookmark all your social media sites in a single folder in your favorites/bookmarks app. I use Google’s Bookmarks tool in the Google Toolbar, so I have access to my favorite web sites anywhere I have an Internet connection. This will give you quicker access to these sites and increase the odds that you keep them up-to-date and active in the future.

Are there other steps you would take to make sure your social media presence is current? Please share your ideas in the comments below.

Filed Under: Career, networking, Personal branding, Social media Tagged With: social media profile audit, social media profiles

Review of Beyond Blogging

January 15, 2010 By Mark Tosczak 3 Comments

Beyond Blogging: The Secrets to Blogging Success is an ebook (actually two) that sells for $47. It was written by Nathan Hangen and Mike Cliffe Jones, and has been receiving quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere, in large part because it contains profiles of successful, well-known bloggers and online personalities. Their goal is help you understand what made those bloggers successful, and how you might be able to achieve similar results:

Blogging can help you get that book deal you’ve always wanted, and in this book we will show you how it can be done. You can create an empire of big or small money making websites so that you can help people and make money doing what you love. Turn it all on auto-pilot and you’ve figured out how to make a living while spending more time having fun. That’s really the dream, isn’t it? Most of us want to find a way to make money without having to sacrifice personal or family time. We want to be able to take trips, spoil our wife and children, and slow down and enjoy life. We’ll show you how to do that.

The book profiles 15 high profile bloggers, including video blogger and wine merchant Gary Vaynerchuk, world traveler Chris Guillebeau, new media expert Chris Garrett, social media superstar Chris Brogan, the breathtakingly candid career blogger Penelope Trunk, six-figure blogger David Risley, money-maker John Chow, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore, marketer Shama Kabani, young entrepreneur Michael Dunlop, career renegade Jonathan Fields, original problogger Darren Rowse, Internet video star iJustine, self-improvement guru Steve Pavlina and copywriter and master online businessman Brian Clark. I was already very familiar with many of these bloggers before I read the book, but a few of them (especially Kabani and Dunlop) I didn’t know at all. While I had heard of iJustine and Cashmore, I didn’t know the details behind their stories.

These are all people who, one way or another, make a lot of money (and usually their living) from their blogs. Many of these bloggers make money the conventional way — they run ads, have affiliate links and sell content. But some of them (most notably Penelope Trunk) use their blogs as platforms on which they have built non-blogging businesses. The profiles are fairly detailed and lay out how these individuals got started blogging, their successes and failures along the way, and how they ended up making money. The book also includes a series of key lessons derived from those bloggers. A second workbook has forms to help you work through key questions for your own blog.

So, the question is, does it live up to its promise of showing you how to make money and do what you love? Yes, and no. Some people will read this book and say to themselves “I already knew all that.” Others could benefit greatly from it (assuming, of course, that they applied what’s in the book). And many, including myself, fall somewhere in between those extremes.

**Who should not buy this book?**

It’s not for you if you:

Are already deeply familiar with the above-mentioned bloggers and their practices
Have already immersed yourself in blogging best practices and have extensively read the advice and tips on sites such as Problogger, Copyblogger and DavidRisley.com
Are looking for detailed technical information and step-by-step instructions
Are not interested in making your blog into a serious business platform

Who should buy the book?

It is for you if you if you:

Are not familiar with these A-lister bloggers and their stories
Are new to blogging and haven’t immersed yourself in best practices
Are committed to making an investment of time (and maybe some money) in your blog in return for building a real business of some sort
Are committed to an “authority blogging” approach — NOT a ‘make money quickly and easily by blogging’ approach

Is it worth buying?

If there’s one place the book falls short, it’s in the ‘here’s how to make money and still have lots of personal and family time.’ Though some probloggers may eventually achieve that goal, the profiles in Beyond Blogging make it clear that most of these folks have worked very, very hard for quite some time to achieve their success. Once they pass certain income levels, they may be able to hire others, set-up some things on autopilot and slow down a bit, but getting there required a lot of time and energy. However, let’s be honest: If this was easy, everyone would be doing it, and no one would be making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars annually through these online platforms.

But if you are truly interested in building a real business (whether a blogging business or an offline business) using online media, Beyond Blogging is a great primer in the key practices involved in doing that.

If you want a fast-start on the authority-blogging practices — creating authoritative content, building a strong brand and leveraging that over time into an income-producing business — without having to slog through hundreds of individual blog posts and interviews, then this book is for you. There’s lots of good advice and tips that, if implemented seriously, will help you to earn back what you spent on the book, and a lot more.

If you’re interested, here’s my affiliate link: Buy Beyond Blogging. The authors do offer a money-back satisfaction guarantee, so your risk here is pretty low if you’re still not sure but you think it might be for you.

If you’ve read it, please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Filed Under: Blogging, Online marketing, Personal branding, Popular, Reviews, Social media Tagged With: Beyond Blogging, Mike Cliffe Jones, Nathan Hangen

Most useful online marketing posts of 2009

December 23, 2009 By Mark Tosczak Leave a Comment

I wish I could say I’d written a bunch of these, but I didn’t. Nonetheless, Who’s Blogging What, a newsletter that rounds up the best in online marketing, has a great list of online marketing posts. There are 25 posts in each of five categories – social media, search marketing, user experience, email marketing and web analytics.

Want “Tips to Get People to Join Your Facebook Fan Page?” It’s there.

How about “Nine Effective Tips for a Better Landing Page?” It’s there, too.

Or “15 Best Places for Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Online?” Yep, it’s there, also.

And much, much more. For what it’s worth, Who’s Blogging What counts as one of my best finds this year, even though it’s been around for years. It’s one of those ideas that makes me slap my forehead and say ‘why didn’t I think of that.’ I didn’t, but fortunately someone else did.

Check out the list of the most useful online marketing posts of 2009.

Filed Under: Blogging, Content marketing, Microblogging, Online marketing, Personal branding, Popular, SEO, Social media, Useful stuff

Five simple steps to using social media for personal branding

December 15, 2009 By Mark Tosczak 5 Comments

Everybody talks about using social media for personal branding, but do you know how to do it? Here are five simple steps for developing a social media plan for personal branding.

One caveat up front: You have to know what your personal brand is before you can execute it. In a nutshell, you’re personal brand is what makes you relevant to your target audience and superior to your competitors. This post is not about branding per se, so I’m going assume you know who your audience is, why you’re relevant to them and what makes you a better choice than your competitors.

1. Define your goals, and make them measurable. Do you want to bring more people to your web site or blog? Do you want to develop more relationships? Get more speaking opportunities? Develop a reputation as the go-to gal in your field of expertise? Whatever your goals, figure them out. Then figure out how to measure them. If you want more people coming to your blog, you can measure unique visitors month-to-month. If you want to develop more professional relationships you can measure how many people your connected to on LinkedIn and what percentage of them you’ve actually met in person or talked to over the phone. Maybe the measurement is how many new people you go to lunch with each month. Whatever it is, find a way to measure it and figure out where you are now.

2. Develop a strategy. Are you going to write insightful blog posts? Record funny podcasts? Shoot short videos and post them to YouTube? Maybe you’ll hang out on LinkedIn and answer questions that people post. Whatever it is, make it something that works for you. Your strategy is how you’re going to communicate your personal brand (which means your expertise, your personality and, I hope, why you’re trustworthy). I encourage you to go with whatever seems natural to you. Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV says in his excellent, inspiring book “Crush It” that he chose to post videos because writing doesn’t come naturally to him (even his book was dictated, not written). Video allows his personality to shine through. Figure out what works for you.

3. Write a plan. OK, you’ve got some goals. You know what your approach is going to be to achieving those goals – your strategy. (And you’ve written all this down, right?) Now put down on paper what you need to do each day, each week, each month to carry out that strategy. Here’s one example of a very simple plan that would probably be fairly typical:

Write two new blog posts each week. Share these blog posts via Twitter and on LinkedIn.
Tweet daily, sharing at least three new links.
Once a week answer a question on LinkedIn.

Your plan might have more or less detail than this, but this would be a pretty good start. And it gives you some specific steps to take to get started. Also, if you’re new to social media, I’m a big fan of starting modestly. It will take you time to develop some of these skills, learn the tricks for doing this quickly and efficiently, and figure out how to manage your time to fit this in with everything else in your life.

4. Execute the plan. Step 4 is simple, but it’s probably the one where most people fail. You’ve got to take action. ‘Nuff said.

5. Evaluate your progress and adjust course as necessary. After a while – a month, three months, six months, whatever – evaluate how far you’ve come and whether or not you’ve accomplished your goals. How many new professional contacts have you made? How many people are visiting your blog each month? If you’ve achieved your goals – great! It’s time to set new, more ambitious goals and work through steps 1 to 5 again. If you didn’t achieve your goals, one of these three things is probably the reason why:

Problem: You didn’t execute your plan, or you only executed it half-heartedly. For example, you planned to blog twice a week but you only blogged twice a month.

Solution: Get off your butt and execute the plan. Take action!!

Problem: You executed your plan, you’re making steady progress, but you haven’t achieved your goals yet.

Solution: Keep working it. The more ambitious your goals, the longer it will take you to achieve them. Most people give up too soon.

Problem: You executed your plan, but you’ve made little or no progress toward your goals. In this case, your strategy is probably wrong. (I’m assuming here that you’ve executed your plan reasonably well and you’ve made a good faith effort to learn and improve at the key skills involved in your strategy, whether it’s writing or shooting photos or whatever.)

Solution: Rewrite your strategy. You may need to spend some time reading case studies and other blogs, figuring out what other people did that worked or figuring out what you’ve been doing that is holding you back. Whatever the case, it’s time for a new approach.

Have more tips or ideas on developing a personal brand with social media? Have questions? Please leave a comment and share.

Filed Under: Career, Personal branding, Popular, Social media

Links Worth Reading – Sept. 27, 2009, edition

September 27, 2009 By Mark Tosczak 4 Comments

Here are some of the best links, blog posts and resources I’ve come across in the last week. Note: Many, but not all, of these I first published via Twitter. Please follow me there if you’re not already.

Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2009

How to Create Reader Profiles/Personas to Inspire and Inform Your Blogging (Great idea right out of marketing research 101. Creating personas is something I’ve done for this blog.)

Free Social Media Worksheets (These are good resources if your planning or executing a social media campaign of some sort.)

Media Usage Study Shows Radio, Online Media Consumption is Up (This blog post links to a news release and other resources. It’s a good, basic reference for those of us working in marketing and public relations.)

The Science of ReTweets (Want to figure out how to increase your odds of getting retweeted? This free report is a good place to start. The author, Dan Zarella, studied 40 million tweets in his analysis.)

Membership Programs for Lead Generation (Joe Pulizzi is a content marketing specialist, and he makes some good points about using membership programs for lead generation. This is a must-read for marketing and sales execs trying to understand how to better use social media and the web to boost the bottom line.)

How to Use Social Media to Market a Boring Product or Service (It’s probably not a good sign if you, as a marketer, think that what you’re marketing is boring. Nonetheless, some products and services are less engaging than others. Keith Burtis points out that you can still use social media to market those by trying back to related passions.)

Six Social Media Marketing Case Study Lessons (Looking for ideas and inspiration for social media marketing? HubSpot has six social media marketing case studies with lessons learned from each. This post is worth bookmarking.)

Let me know what you think of these links in the comments.

Filed Under: Blogging, Content marketing, Links Worth Reading, Media, Social media, Writing

Eight tips for writing shorter tweets

May 26, 2009 By Mark Tosczak 1 Comment

Twitter, the microblogging sensation that is all the rage – at least among marketers and social media aficionados – requires a considerable economy of phrasing. Fitting a useful thought into 140 characters, including a URL, can be tough sometimes. And if you want your tweet to be retweeted – spread by your followers – than you’re better off making it even shorter, like maybe 120 characters.

To that end, here are a few tips on how to tighten your tweets:

Cut unnecessary words – fillers, redundancies and words that don’t add anything, for example. If you put an opinion in Twitter, you don’t need to say “I think” – we assume that’s why you tweeted it unless you’re attributing it to someone else.
Choose shorter words over longer – “about” instead of “approximately,” for example.
Eliminate unnecessary punctuation. Do you really need those quote marks to emphasize something? Probably not. Do you need the extra “:” that Twitter adds in retweets? Again, probably not.
Use contractions (ex. “didn’t” for “did not”) and acronyms, though judiciously. Don’t sacrifice clarity for conciseness.
Make use of symbols – %, &, etc. – liberally.
Substitute punctuation for conjunctions. For example, a comma in place of an “and.”
Incorporate hashtags as part of the tweet, instead of putting it on the end. For example, “#PR pros will find this useful …”
Revise, revise, revise. It’s amazing how often, just as I think I’ve boiled a thought down to its essence, one more revision allows me to tighten it even more. Focus on your core thought or message.

That’s it. Follow these guidelines consistently and you’ll end up with shorter tweets that are more retweetable. If you have more ideas about how to shorten the length of your tweets, please add mention them in the comments.

Filed Under: Microblogging, Social media, Writing Tagged With: Twitter

Facebook, a BlackBerry and a collapsed lung

April 10, 2009 By Mark Tosczak 2 Comments

Here’s the situation: I was laying in a hospital bed, with an IV in my arm and a chest tube in my side attached to a gurgling machine that provided suction. I was on some pretty hefty drugs – morphine and then other narcotics for pain. At 38, I had been hospitalized for a totally unexpected reason.

For those of you who don’t know the story, I had woken up early on the morning of March 2 to chest pain, and after several hours of dithering around (because I was pretty sure it wasn’t a heart attack, so it couldn’t be serious, right?) I went to an urgent care where x-rays showed that my right lung had collapsed. Think of a balloon popping; that’s more or less what happened with my lung. As it turns out, you can function on one lung, especially if you’re relatively healthy, as I was (at least up to that point). The condition is called spontaneous pneumothorax, and no, the doctors don’t really know what caused it.

My wife was sending out emails to a select group of friends, co-workers, my boss and some relatives about my condition periodically, but there are many more people not on her email list – other colleagues, friends, etc. – who were interested in how I was doing. Fortunately, when I had driven myself to the ER (yes, I made several bad decisions that day), I brought along my BlackBerry. That not only allowed me to call my wife (“Honey, I have a collapsed lung and am going to be admitted to the hospital”), and send email to my boss (“Um, I’m not going to be coming in to work today”), but it also allowed me to update my Facebook status. And that is the whole point of this post.

I spent 12 days in the hospital, almost the entire first half of March. And without that BlackBerry and the ability to send email and update my Facebook status, it would have appeared to dozens and dozens of friends and acquaintances that I had disappeared. In addition, some friends who wanted to know – people who stopped by to visit me – would have never known that I was hospitalized with a serious medical condition. Even my sister, who called me almost every day, sometimes more than once, relied in part on my Facebook status updates to keep tabs on me.

I had lunch with a friend this week who said that my status updates on Facebook during my hospitalization really made him appreciate the power of social media. I have long been a social media enthusiast (and, professionally, an advocate), but this whole incident really brought home to me the power of these tools. I received wishes to get well, messages of concern and requests to visit through Facebook, which were instrumental in keeping my mood mostly positive during the experience. (In fact, I should say again to those people – thank you so much for your support. It made a huge difference to me.)

Most of what we post on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites is ephemeral – a fleeting thought, an interesting link, a comment or question you’re likely to forget in a few hours or a few days. But in some circumstances, these interactions can be incredibly powerful, engaging, and socially and emotionally meaningful. So the next time someone tells you that all this online stuff is just a waste of time, or it’s just for kids, or it’s not important, tell them my story.

Filed Under: Social media Tagged With: BlackBerry, Facebook

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